Why Shania Twain’s shrine died, but Anne Murray’s lives on

Last week, Timmins city council announced the Shania Twain Centre, the city’s 11-year, multi-million-dollar bid to lure tourists to the heart of Northern Ontario, was coming to an ignominious end.

Responding to Timmins’s entreaties, Vancouver-based Goldcorp bought the property for an undisclosed sum and, within a few years, the site of the 12,000-square-foot centre will be part of a new mining project.

“I think they probably are going to take the buildings down,” said Tom Laughren, Timmins mayor.

Meanwhile, 2,000 kilometres away in Springhill, N.S., the humble shrine to Canada’s other great female country singer, Anne Murray, is set this summer to ring in its 24th year: the same age at which its namesake recorded the breakout hit, “Snowbird.”

Two small Canadian mining towns, both of whom spawned famous singers, yet one attraction lives while the other dies. The reason, it turns out, may be a fable of nostalgia versus modernity, grassroots gumption versus government bungling and the cruel twists of highway geography.

“She’s our hometown girl,” said Maxwell Snow, Springhill’s mayor.

Until their favourite daughter became the CanCon selection of choice in the mid-1960s, Springhill was mostly known to Canadians as the site of two devastating mine disasters.

Describing the Anne Murray Centre’s late-1980s origins as “grassroots,” employee Marcie Meekins said it was spawned by some volunteers with the Springhill Industrial Commission who teamed up with her mother Marion. They raked together grants and established the small, brick centre, which is open seasonally and run by a volunteer board.

The Shania Twain Centre, meanwhile, was birthed by city council decree.

In the late 1990s, at the height of Ms. Twain’s career, citizens noticed fans poking around for Twain-related monuments or landmarks. Local officials on the lookout for an attraction to complement their longstanding Underground Gold Mine Tour got an idea.

“The initial thought was that, if these people are already coming to Timmins, let’s give them something more to see,” said Tracy Hautanan, the centre’s former manager.

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A delegation approached the singer, who responded with offers of gold records, memorabilia, even her tour bus and a surplus stage.

“She very much held up her end of the deal,” said Ms. Hautanan. “Whenever she won an award, it was shipped to the Shania Twain Centre. Any outfit she wore publicly ended up on display within weeks.”

Rounding up $6-million in municipal funding and federal grants, Timmins outfitted its centre with a massive, high-ceilinged lobby and a recreation of the Maple Leaf Hotel bar, where Ms. Twain had some of her first gigs.

Visitors peaked in 2002 at 8,400, and by 2010 only about 2,000 were plunking down the $10 for admission. At Timmins’ 9th Annual Shania Twain Fan Convention in 2011, only 20 people showed up.

Burdened with high overhead costs, by its final year of operation, the centre was hemorrhaging $300,000 a year.

“Shania Twain herself is very popular [in Timmins], but I’m not sure that extended to the centre itself,” said Mayor Laughren. “And with tourism, you need local buy-in to succeed.”

Last summer, sensing the end was nigh, Ms. Twain moved her artifacts to more visited locations.

Mr. Laughren ticked off a standard list of low-tourism justifications: SARS, the struggling U.S. economy, the surging C$ and terrorism. “9/11 definitely changed the way people travelled,” he said.

Still, the Anne Murray Centre seems to have dodged the perils of pandemics and Saudi hijackers. “The summer before last when the economy was so bad, the Anne Murray Centre still attracted an increase of 600 new visitors,” said Mr. Snow.

It helps that Springhill straddles the corridor between Montreal and Halifax. “Just five kilometres off the highway,” he added.

Any Twain fan making the trip from Toronto to Thunder Bay, meanwhile, would need to take a 90-minute detour to swing through Timmins and pray her centre was open.

Which is probably why most of her fans are opting for a ticket to Las Vegas to catch her live at Caesars Palace.

“Museums are about loss, they’re about preserving things that we don’t have anymore,” said Stuart Henderson, a professor of cultural history at McMaster University.

“We’re just not done with Shania Twain yet, at least not in the same way that (sorry Anne Murray) we are done with Anne Murray.”

Fortunately for Springhill, Ms. Murray’s twilighting career is a good recipe for ensuring a higher rate of Anne sightings: “Anne spends her summers in Nova Scotia so we see her quite frequently and she always makes one scheduled public appearance to commemorate the Centre’s anniversary,” wrote Ms. Meekins.

Ms. Murray’s career has traded on the rural charm of her Acadian, maritime roots — an aspect played up by the Springhill attraction. Ms. Twain’s catalogue of catchy pop hits, by contrast, has never really exemplified the flannel and grime of a Canadian Shield mining town.

Notably, the videos for two of Ms. Twain’s biggest hits, Man! I Feel Like a Woman! and That Don’t Impress Me Much, were shot in the decidedly un-Canadian locations of New York and the Mojave Desert, respectively.

“You can’t immerse yourself in Shania Twain in Timmins because Timmins is not really a part of her,” said Mr. Henderson.